America Mobilizing to Protect Midterms

Thousands of people are preparing to protect the midterm elections and mobilize immediately if President Trump interferes with the results. They are drawing lessons from the American civil rights era and from fights against authoritarianism worldwide, attending political education classes, and reassessing exactly how much they will risk, personally, to stand between a government takeover and the will of the voters.

“There’s a deeper, broader, bolder set of efforts afoot to prepare people for much more existential scenarios that could come our way that would call into question the pillars of our democracy itself for what it’s for and who it’s for,” said Jackson Potter, vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union. “People are zeroing in.”

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He’s organizing with May Day Strong, which this month hosted more than 750 “solidarity school” training sessions nationwide. The group is now in the midst of a week of direct action to call on corporate executives to use their influence to defend the midterms, which organizers told the Prospect is a key part of training because it gives volunteers ways to practice confronting power ahead of Election Day.

The American Civil Liberties Union and its affiliates have been preparing volunteers, too, spending a record $25.5 million on voter education. More than 67,000 new volunteers have signed up for the group’s People Power list since June, said Molly McGrath, director of national democracy campaigns at ACLU. She calls this increase, the biggest the group has ever seen, proof that “there is a huge appetite on the ground for voters to work together to safeguard our elections.”

Volunteers who sign up are connected to local training sessions on the limits of the federal government, election rules in the volunteer’s state, polling place monitoring, and methods to talk with friends and family about voting. The group is focusing especially on races that could tip the balance of power, districts in which election officials have previously cast doubt on the results, and states with close races. That includes traditional battleground states like Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, as well as Iowa, Ohio, and Maine.

The discussion includes not only what happens on Election Day, but the day after, with volunteers planning how they will mobilize if Trump or his allies in the states refuse to accept the results.

“I used to take my team to brunch on Wednesday but that is no longer the case,” McGrath said. “Now we get ready for phase two.”

Multiple other pro-democracy groups are holding training sessions and workshops across the country before November 3. The AFL-CIO has recruited and trained more than 50,000 volunteers to protect polling sites, especially in communities of color and places that ICE is targeting. It is conducting election protection training and other events nationwide, and publishing voter resource guides. Freedom Trainers, Indivisible, and the Immigrant Defense Network are likewise running trainings, as are numerous unions, faith groups, and community organizations, a testament to what Alejandra Lopez, president of the San Antonio Alliance of Teachers and Support Personnel, told the Prospect was a rejection of Trump’s violent campaign of ethnic cleansing, immiseration of working people, and illegal wars abroad.

The solidarity school in San Antonio brought together the Texas Organizing Project, San Antonio DSA, and labor unions to prepare get-out-the-vote initiatives and how the community will respond “if our vote or our ability to vote is threatened during the actual election period.” That includes documenting intimidation and showing out en masse.

“We’re basically looking at each other and saying, ‘Yeah, I’m committed to doing these things because I care about our community and I care about our future,’” Lopez said.

FEWER THAN HALF OF AMERICANS say they expect the elections next month will be “free and fair,” according to a September survey by UC San Diego researchers, which blamed the uncertainty in part on federal immigration officers showing up to the polls. It found that 39 percent of Asian American and Pacific Islander, 31 percent of Hispanic, and nearly a quarter of Black respondents agreed with the statement “I worry that going to the polls could put me at risk of being questioned by federal immigration officers, despite being a U.S. citizen.”

The Trump administration has stoked those fears with plans to send “a historic number” of election monitors to polling sites and its ongoing campaign to undermine mail-in ballots, including by a failed attempt to disenfranchise voters by restricting ballot delivery through the United States Postal Service. Trump is also blocking the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe from overseeing the election, as they have for two decades, and on Monday met with Tina Peters, the former county clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, who was criminally convicted of attempting to overturn the 2020 election results. According to 9News in Denver, the two discussed a plan to seize ballots across the country to force a hand recount.

Bob Kuttner laid out a case in the Prospect this summer for how Trump could attempt a coup, just as he did on January 6, 2021, to overturn the election results.

Three hundred people studied that possibility at a solidarity school in Chicago recently, said Potter, the teachers union vice president. The group analyzed what happened in South Korea on December 3, 2024, when then-president Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law late at night in an attempted coup, the first time a leader had done so since the military dictatorship ended. Thousands of people mobilized immediately to gather in Seoul at the National Assembly that night. They kept coming, even though they were breaking the new law and despite special forces dropping from helicopters to thwart them. Nearly 200 lawmakers raced to the building, broke through police forces, and climbed over fences to cast votes against the decree, which they unanimously struck down. Yoon conceded defeat around 1 a.m. Now he’s serving a life sentence in prison.

The crowd in Chicago discussed some of the lessons from that attempted authoritarian takeover, including speed and preparation. Participants considered that trade unions and other activists were successful not just because they mobilized quickly, but also because people were willing to take personal risks, and what that might mean for them, Potter said.

“We took inspiration for practice, and also what that might feel like, and got people to assess their own level of preparation for being willing to be uncomfortable in this moment if it’s required of us to defend our basic rights” as well as demand more than the status quo, said Potter, who wrote about solidarity schools in Labor Notes earlier this year. The discussion was transformative, he said, and some people who have never considered risking arrest told him afterward that they were doing so now for the first time.

“I see people developing their cost-benefit analysis of what they’re willing to do,” Potter said, adding that training sessions reveal gaps in strategy that can be resolved in time to make a difference. At one session, virtually every hand shot up when facilitators asked if volunteers were willing to go on strike if Trump tampers with the election, following a similar approach to Minnesota’s economic blackout earlier this year, when residents called for “no work, no school, no shopping.” But fewer hands remained when facilitators asked who had spoken to their co-workers about it, illustrating what they should do next.

The sessions are also illustrating other important points, including who lives in the community, a takeaway that Andrea Luna Cervantes, the campaign manager of Organized Power in Numbers, said came out of a workshop in Phoenix, Arizona, which gave participants who wanted to build a community a place to start. About 80 people attended, and their ages ranged from high schoolers to people in their seventies; they discussed tactics they could use together if Trump throws out the results.

“People were thinking through direct action,” she said. What if the votes don’t get counted or ballots get stolen? “We mobilize people in mass to come out and make noise.”

Volunteers who spoke with the Prospect called on people to join them, saying there’s always a need for more people and that there is strength in numbers. That was the message from Jeff H., a volunteer with the ACLU in the Atlanta area who spoke on condition of first name, last initial only. The reason he volunteers to monitor polls and conduct trainings is the same reason he became a Marine years ago.

“I felt like it was my duty as an American,” he told the Prospect. “Patriotism to me is not about waving a flag … To me patriotism is doing whatever is necessary to defend our country. It’s why I used to carry an M16 for a living, why I wore a mask during the pandemic.”

The bottom line, he said, is “if not us, then who?”